Sunday, April 30, 2017

Tracy Chevalier’s New Boy is a 2017 addition to the
Hogarth Shakespeare series that began in October 2015. At that time, Crown
Publishing invited a group of notable novelists each to retell one of
Shakespeare’s classic plays as a Shakespeare-inspired novel written in their
own style, and Chevalier’s novel is based upon Shakespeare’s Othello. New
Boy was preceded by four earlier
Hogarth Shakespeare books and will be followed by perhaps three others.

I believe these to be the Hogarth Shakespeare books published to date:

Jeanette Winterson – The Gap of
Time (based upon The Winter’s Tale)

Howard Jacobson – Shylock Is My
Name (based upon The Merchant of Venice)

Anne Tyler – Vinegar Girl (based
upon The Taming of the Shrew)

Margaret Atwood – Hag-Seed (based
upon The Tempest)

Tracy Chevalier – New Boy (based
upon Othello)(June 6, 2017)

I believe, too, that these are the books yet to be published:

Jo Nesbó – an as yet
untitled book based upon Macbeth

Edward St. Aubyn – an as
yet untitled book based upon King Lear

Gillian Flynn- an as yet
untitled book based upon Hamlet

As far as I can tell, the Nesbó book was originally scheduled to
precede New Boy but has yet to make its appearance.The St. Aubyn book is scheduled for April
2018, and the Gillian Flynn take on Hamlet for January 2021.

Chevalier has taken the heart of Shakespeare’s Othello tragedy
and transferred it from its original time and setting to a 1970s Washington
D.C. school playground.New Boy is
the story of a boy’s first day as a new fifth grade elementary student in a
D.C. suburb where he becomes the only black child in the school.The school year is down to its final month,
and most of the fifth-graders have known each other now for the better part of
six years.They are shocked to find a
new student among them at this late date – especially a boy from Ghana with
whom they seem to have nothing at all in common.

Tracy Chevalier

Osei is so different from every other child on the playground that he
immediately attracts the attention of every child there.Most of the children are simply curious, but
the fifth-grade bully (Ian) is acutely aware that Osei is a potential threat to
his reign of terror, and the little girl (Dee) assigned to show him around the
school on his first day soon finds herself falling in love with the new boy.Dee’s reaction to Osei, though, is the last
straw for Ian, and he is determined to destroy any chance of friendship between
the most popular girl in the fifth grade and the new boy even before it has a
chance to get started.

New Boy is divided into
natural breaks in the school day: Before School, Morning Recess, Lunch,
Afternoon Recess, and After School.During each of these segments, Dee and Osei grow closer and closer while
Ian manipulates the other fifth-grade students in his plot to destroy that
relationship.By the end of the day, friendships
have been destroyed, fights endured, student and teacher reputations destroyed,
and lives changed forever – and not for the better.

Not at all surprisingly, the Hogarth
Shakespeare novels work well as standalone novels and can be enjoyed that way,
but readers familiar with Shakespeare’s plots will especially enjoy noting
where and how the plots of the novels intersect with the Shakespeare plays. The
Hogarth Shakespeare series is one not to be missed.

Friday, April 28, 2017

Hard as it is to believe, Garden of Lamentations is Deborah Crombie’s seventeenth novel in
the Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James series that started in 1993 with publication
of A Share in Death.Fans of the series will come into this
one already knowing that Kincaid and James are husband and wife police
detectives who live in London with their three children.They will also likely know that in the
previous novel in the series, To Dwell in
Darkness, Duncan was transferred from his Scotland Yard position to an
outlying police district and that Duncan became involved in an investigation
that very much made him worry about the personal safety of himself and his
family.Not only were Duncan and Gemma
pushed to their physical and mental limits, their best friends (and fellow
cops), Doug and Melody, were equally tested.The last few pages of To Dwell in
Darkness hinted of more dark things to come for the four characters, and
Crombie is quick to pick up on that theme in Garden of Lamentations.Do
not, however, worry too much about reading this one even if you haven’t read in
the series before, because this new one works pretty well as a standalone novel
also.

It all starts for Gemma James when the body of a young woman
is discovered early one morning inside the walled, private garden of a group of
wealthy London property owners.As it
turns out, the young victim had been acquainted with one of Gemma’s close
friends, and that friendship somehow sucks Gemma into the investigation before
she realizes what is happening.She is
not particularly happy about that, but when her friend’s influential husband
manages to get her officially seconded to the investigation there is no getting
out of it.Regular mystery readers will
recognize this as a version of the classic “locked room” type of mystery – no
way into the garden without first going through one of the residences that
surround it.

Deborah Crombie

In the meantime, Kincaid is revisiting the unfinished
business from the previous novel and what he learns is enough to scare him to
death. It seems that the rot inside Scotland Yard and the London Police runs
deep and to very high levels.Cops and
ex-cops are being killed all over London and it is up to Kincaid, Doug, and
Melody, to figure out who is calling the shots before they themselves become
victims of the same plot.

The two storylines pretty much run independently of each
other, intersecting only when the main characters meet up to touch base and
work out the resentments and hurt feelings resulting from having had so little
personal contact with each other.Because both of the plot lines are complicated and involve multiple
characters and red herrings, I advise the reader to pay strict attention to
what is revealed; this is not a novel to read when you are drowsy or have other
distractions. Pay attention, however, and you will be intrigued by both the
investigations and where they lead (pay particular attention to the
descriptions and names in the flashback to 1994).

Crombie has another winner on her hands.Her novels cannot help but remind the reader
of Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley series, another detective series set in
London but written by an American, but in my estimation, Crombie’s recent novels
are more satisfying and enjoyable than George’s recent ones.If you are unfamiliar with Crombie, jump on
board. You’ll be happy that you did.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

“Sailing to Byzantium” is a long “short” story of 59 pages
from Robert Silverberg.Silverberg, who
sold his first story in 1954, went on to become one of the most respected
writers in all of science fiction.He is
a particular favorite of mine because of his special talent for creating fully
developed, believable characters to inhabit the pages of his science fiction
and fantasy stories.No matter how
outlandish or speculative the plots of his stories, it always feels like they
are happening to real people.

“Sailing to Byzantium” is set in a 50th century
world in which only five cities exist.These are not, by any stretch of the imagination, ordinary cities; they
are replicas of major cities from the past that have been reconstructed here as
they were in their prime solely for the pleasure of this world’s citizens to
explore and experience them.From
time-to-time, one of the cities is “retired” and replaced by a new one so that
people will always have a new experience to look forward to.Since no one in this world seems to have a
job anymore, rotating the cities on a regular basis plays a major role in
keeping boredom to a minimum.

Robert Silverberg

The five cities are all staffed by “temporaries,” a group of
people there to play the roles of those who lived in the actual cities in the
past.As the story begins, the current
cities are: Chang-an, Asgard, New Chicago, Timbuctoo, and Alexandria.The story’s central character is a “visitor”
to the 50the century, a tall man who has vivid memories of the “Old Chicago.”
The man knows almost nothing about himself except that he is different from
everyone he has met so far.He remembers
that his name is Charles Phillips and that he has somehow been transported here
from his 1984 life…whatever that may have been like.

Phillips wonders about the true nature of the “temporaries”
he encounters as he explores different cities with his 50th century
girlfriend.Are they real or are they
something less than human?But wonder as
he might, definitive answers are hard to come by until he meets another
“visitor” from the past for the first time ever.Phillips is astounded to learn that this
Viking warrior from a period in time much older than his own has figured out a
few things for himself that never occurred to Phillips’ more “modern”
self.

“Sailing to Byzantium” is first class science fiction, but
it really hits its stride when it shifts into a story of true love between the
twentieth century Phillips and his doomed fiftieth century girlfriend.This story is too easy to spoil by saying
much more, so I’m going to stop right here.Silverberg fans are probably already familiar with this one and how it
turns out, but if you are not one of those hardcore Silverberg fans, I
recommend that you find “Sailing to Byzantium” and enjoy it as a standalone
read.It’s a good one.

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Because in 1994 Anne Perry’s books were not yet
selling in the numbers they soon would sell, many of her current fans (if they
were old enough even to have heard about it at the time) missed the big
announcement that year about the author’s true identity.Some forty years after having been convicted
of one of the more infamous murders in the history of New Zealand, a New
Zealand journalist revealed that Anne Perry is none other than convicted
murderer Juliet Hulme – the same Juliet Hulme who in 1954, as a teen, helped
Pauline Parker, her best friend, beat the girl’s mother to death with half a
brick that Juliet brought from home for that specific purpose.Peter Graham’s Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century is a meticulously
researched account of events leading up to the murder, the murder itself, the
trial that followed, and what happened to the key players in those events once
the two killers had been released from prison to go their separate ways.

Juliet Hulme, daughter of a prominent English couple, came to New
Zealand as a young girl when her father was recruited for a university position
in Christchurch.Her lack of social
skills did not stop the physically striking Juliet from making an impression on
her classmates, albeit it, for the most part, a negative impression.Pauline Parker, on the other hand, was
blessed neither with physical attractiveness, nor with any social skills of which
to speak. The angry and socially inept Pauline wanted badly to find a soul-mate
to whom she could reveal her thoughts and dreams, and Juliet wanted just as
badly to find someone she could recreate in her own image. The two girls were
made for each other because each of them got their wish.

The two teens shortly after the murder

Pauline Parker’s mother,
Honorah Rieper, did not die an easy death.Barely aware of what was happening to her, the woman nonetheless
valiantly attempted to fight off her attackers, and it was only when Juliet
held her down by the throat that Pauline was finally able to finish off her
mother.There was never any doubt as to
whom the woman’s murderers were, but the defiantly gleeful manner in which the
two teens confessed to what they had done still managed to shock and surprise
the country.

Five and one-half years later, after the two young women were
released from prison, they assumed new names and began the new lives far from
Christchurch, that they hoped would shield them from further notoriety.And it worked for forty years.

There is a lot of material out there, including one major movie (Heavenly Creatures), a documentary made
inside Anne Perry’s Scotland home (Interiors),
and several books that attempt to explain how two fifteen-year-old girls could
so callously murder the mother of one of them.In Anne Perry and the Murder of
the Century, Peter Grahamexplores
each possibility, one by one, reaching his own conclusion that the strong homosexual
ties between the two girls, compounded by a perfect meshing of two distinct
personality disorders, created exactly the perfect storm needed to make such a
thing possible.

More recent photo of "Anne Perry"

Perhaps most shocking today, is how differently the two women have
responded to what they did in 1954.On
the one hand, Paulette Parker has lived a life of repentance and appears still
to be much bothered by what she did to her mother.On the other, Juliet Hulme (Anne Perry) still
shows no remorse whatsoever and has constructed a version of the events that
she uses to explain why she had no other choice but to help her friend commit matricide.As Graham notes, Perry’s version of what led
up to the murder is so obviously false that it cannot be taken seriously.Anne Perry appears to be much the same person
that she was in 1954.

When asked if she ever thinks of the woman she and Paulette murdered,
this writer who has made a fine living for herself writing bloody murder
mysteries for the last four decades said this:

“No. She was somebody I barely
knew.”

And yet, as late as 2006 according to Peter Graham, Anne Perry and
her publisher were known to grant interviews about the murder just prior to the
publication of a new Anne Perry book, under the theory, I suppose, that “no
publicity is bad publicity.”

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